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This is only a half-serious post, I just wanted to see if other people have pondered the same theme and to hear their opinions. In almost all ways I consider myself a loving and peaceful individual. I want the best for everyone else, I always try to help people when I can just for the joy of helping, I detest all kinds of violence and aggressiveness etc. I have meditated on these feelings and intentions a lot and have found them to be genuine.

Yet my musical tastes seem to reflect the complete opposite of these feelings. Even though I listen to a lot of genres, the only thing that constantly resonates with me as "my own genre" and which I never tire of is pure and evil black metal  It's almost beyond my own comprehension how much I love it. The more evil and chaotic the atmosphere is, the more depressing and haunting the riffs are, the more misantrophic and aggressive the lyrics are, the better. I even love how demented and dangerous well made corpse paints can make the band members seem, and the genuinely dangerous atmosphere on some of these band's concerts. A song is perfected when in addition to these elements it has some absolutely creepy, disturbing and unexpected elements.

The reason why I started this topic is that a lot of spiritually inclined people I know seem to think that this kind of music actually has an effect on my consciousness or my soul, and that If I want to keep growing and steer clear of negative energies I should avoid this kind of music. At first glance this seems like a ridiculous idea, but I have to admit that when listening to the kind of music I described above, it actually makes me feel depression, aggression, melancholia, and even madness to some point. But since all of these feelings clearly arise from the music, I can observe them as curiosities, and enjoy them like I would enjoy more happy and positive feelings. And after the music has ended, they are gone.

I would be really interested to hear if any of you have an opinion about this, or have friends with the same kind of beliefs. Even though I'm not taking these claims completely seriously, I admit this topic seems to pop in to my mind at regular intervals.

(Funny and related side note: When I spell checked this post, the only suggestion given to me was to change "half-serious" to "hellfire's"  )

First post, so hi everyone!

I have been practicing astral projection and out of body experiences for about 6 weeks now. The first few weeks i tried only the method described by Monroe with little success, but after I read about dream-to-OBE techniques, I immediately managed to have out of body experiences three nights in the same week. All of my successful attempts went something like this:

I got to sleep and set up my alarm clock to wake me up at about 4.30 am (4.5 - 6 hours of sleep). I stay up for about 15 minutes to wake myself up completely, then go back to bed with the intention of waking up to an OBE. I drift straight to a lucid dream or make myself lucid from a normal dream, decide to wake up, wake up in sleep paralysis at which point I can quickly just get up from my body. I then move around my house, touching different things and trying to watch myself in a mirror etc. However, there are a few things that bug me:

Blurry vision. At one attempt, I got my vision clearer by meditating on my third eye. After that I felt a hand on my shoulder and lost my concentration after a while, so my vision gut blurred again. On my other attempts, I have gotten vision by first thinking about what I am supposed to see, but then I see things that shouldn't be, for example it was summer outside even though the ground is completely covered by snow.

When I'm touching things in my house, most are as they should be, but there are some inconsistencies, for example the door knob of my closet was completely different than it should have been.

I can feel my physical eyes all the time. When I'm concentrating on getting my vision back, I feel like I have to keep my physical eyes deliberately closed, otherwise I fear I'll really open them and wake up. Also when I return to my body, for the first few times my sleep paralysis is still on and I still can't open my eyes, so I just go out again.

My question is, even though these are certainly out of body experiences (as I can even touch my sleeping body), are these just a form of lucid dreaming? I have had some lucid dreams before and these feel certainly different, but those inconsistencies worry me (last night I even managed to move my physical body with my OBE body). I'd like to have real astral projections and being able to clearly see and go places, so in your experience, should I just keep practicing with this technique or should I start trying to get the vibrations etc. from an awakened state?

Sorry for the long post, all opinions and experiences are greatly appreciated.